Today was a day of patching in holes in The Four Quartets, or rather in our presentations of them. We got through about twelve lines of Burnt Norton, the rest of our time(whatever in the world that is really) was spent on digressions, which were of course illuminating in the extreme, as digressions tend to be.

Among them were the discussion of the lines by Heraklitus that open the poems, which translated into English from the Greek are "The way up is the way down." This is clearly reflected in The Dry Salvages, though I have to confess Willy Wonka sprung to my mind as well. Heraklitus, who was a pre-Socratic philosopher(one of the Ionians to be specific) who revealed in the notion of paradox and coined the phrase "You can't step in the same river twice." None of these were things that I really knew before.

We also have the notion of time and its poetic relation to place, so prominent for Eliot in these poems. This suggests that place is a potent artistic thing; you choose a place, like Burnt Norton or East Coker or Tintern Abbey, and let the place come to you, the past of it and also the future of it come into the "now" that you are there. Because what didn't happen matters more than what did happen, in some strange way. What might have been is always an imaginative possibility, as the movie Sliding Doors apparently is an example of(which actually sounds almost exactly like a movie directed by Krystof Kieslowski called Blind Chance), as well as the last quarter of Kazantzaki's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I also need to read the Henry James story The Wrong Corner and Saint John of the Cross

*and a final note for this blog. Perhaps I was wrong and over-heated describing Eliot as a "rabid" anti-semite, and in making the grave error of bringing biographical information into play with discussion of the poet's work. I could chaulk it up to the heat engendered by my dark epiphany or it could just as well be that I am an un-learned reader, as of yet or when will be. Just felt I should mention it.